A variety of geographic or location based services (LBS), such as geographic recommendation services (GRS), are available today thanks to location enabled user equipments. Typically, known GRS may push content to a user equipment upon detecting his presence in a certain location. One such system is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,452,498, incorporated herein as if set out in its entirety, in which content is pushed to a mobile unit of a user when the mobile unit accesses an access point connected to a network.
Other recommendation systems may use road directions between a starting and end point to select content pushed to the user as taught in U.S. Patent Application 2011-040626, incorporated herein as if set out in its entirety. More specifically, once a starting and end points are determined for a user, the system will determine a road linking both points and push content based on the determined road and a user profile. Such solutions can address needs like “find me a sushi bar” and provide a destination answering the expressed need.
These systems are today limited as they mostly address specific questions like “find me this category of point of interest (POI)” or “what is the best way to get to this POI”. They are all closed questions about the user's needs, with a destination. They cannot address questions like “I want to eat within the next hour”, i.e. open questions expressing just an intent from the user. For instance, a user is driving south on highway 101, and expresses through his user equipment (UE), such as a mobile station (MS), an intent to have lunch within the next hour. As here no specific destination is mentioned, and only intent is expressed, possibly associated with a time window, existing solutions will not be able to address such a need.
Today there is still a need for a simple solution that allows a user to express an intent to a geographic based recommendation system. There is a further need for a solution that addresses the user intent with limited input from him.